It’s important to know how your website is performing because that information can help you make the right decisions about your overall strategy and marketing efforts. And thankfully, there are a number of both free and paid analytics tools available that can help you do that.
While people usually trust tools and apps that they pay for, in this case, you should actually opt for the free tools.
So in this article, we will explore some of the best and most popular ones, that we personally use and also recommend to all our clients.
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Free analytics tools by Google
Google Analytics
Even though it might look confusing at first, Google Analytics is a great tool that gives you a lot of insights and information about your website visitors.
The way it works is it collects the information from your website and turns them into reports that help you understand your website’s visitors. From demographics to how they found the website and on what device they are browsing it, with Google Analytics you can really get the smallest details that can help you improve the visitors’ experience and conversation rates.
The best part is that you can completely customise reports so they show only insights that are valuable to you.
To get started, you need to sign up for the account and connect to your website – you can get the full instruction here.
Also, Google provides very detailed instructions on how to make the most of this tool, so once you get your head around it, you’ll see it’s actually pretty simple and easy to use it.
Google Search Console
While Google Analytics helps you understand the visitors, Google Search Console helps you understand “how Google sees your website”.
It shows your website ranking for specific searches if your pages are indexed i.e if Google is even considering showing them in search results, and how to fix any indexing issues certain pages have.
In addition, you get information about your organic website traffic, how many times people see it in search results and what percentage of those people actually click to visit it.
It also provides information about backlinks, i.e which site contains links to your website, and alarms spam or any other potential issues with your website.
To get started, you can read this instruction to make sure you have connected Search Console correctly with your website.
Pagespeed Insights
Pagespeed insights give a quick overview of your website speed, performance and user experience on both desktop and mobile, together with suggestions on how to improve it.
It’s really simple to use, and unlike with the previous tools, you don’t have to create an account for it or connect it to the back end of the website.
All you need to do is put your website URL and run the analysis. You will receive a score for performance, accessibility and SEO.
Then you will get a recommendation for improvement for each of those categories, as well as found issues and how to fix them.
Hotjar
This is a really useful tool that shows your visitors’ behaviour. The way it works is very simple – whenever someone lands on the website, Hotjar starts recording their visit in a so-called session. Those sessions then give you valuable insights to see what your visitors see when they land on your website, how they behave, what page they visit the most, and what actions they take.
Based on all the sessions recorded, it creates a heatmap, that shows where users click during, for example, the booking process. These are all valuable information to have as they can reveal potential glitches that you weren’t aware of before or show room for improvement.
Of course, this tool is completely legal and compliant, so you can rest assured that all sessions it has recorded are not breaching any regulations or privacy policies.
Hotjar has a free and paid version and depending on the number of visitors you get daily, the free version might be just enough for you.
In any case, I recommend first going with the free version to test out the tool and see whether you need the paid version at all.
Less is more
With so many available free website analytics tools available these days, it can be tempting to keep switching from one to another, or using a lot of them at the same time. But this can only lead to overwhelm, and to even information that is contradictory to each other.
Our opinion here is very simple – stick with tools that Google has created. After all, it’s their engine that we are all trying to get on our side, and the tools they have created are definitely the most trustworthy and the ones that will help us achieve that.
Let’s set your hotel website up for success!
Whether you want a brand new site, or to improve your existing one, you are in the right place.
From small, family-owned businesses to travel behemoths, we have worked with countless travel, tourism and hospitality businesses over the years. We’ve taken their websites to the next level – and we can do the same for you!
Get in touch with us and let’s turn your hotel website into a booking machine!
Related articles:
Anatomy Of Effective Hotel Websites
Five Ways To Increase The Number Of Direct Hotel Bookings
The Key Ingredient to Creating Effective Travel Websites
Five Tips for Writing Room Descriptions For a Hotel Website
Until next time,
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